Stop That Girl (13 page)

My appointment at the Financial Aid office was at three, and we rolled into Santa Cruz right on time. Up we went through the town to the university, which was located on an old ranch of open fields and redwood forests on some gentle hills overlooking the sea.

“Tell those cheapskates the regents are overpaid and to give you some cash,” Jake said, letting me out in front of the curiously ugly cement structure.

“Thanks,” I said. “Where should I meet you?”

“I’ll come back and pick you up, how about.”

“No, go see your brother,” I said. “I’ll find you.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Winston’s at College Five. So just walk through the woods thataway and I’ll look for you in about an hour in the coffeehouse. Don’t get lost, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“We’re going to have fun tonight,” he called out after me.

I waved.

“See you!” he called.

I waved again.

Then I stepped into the building and found the office where they would decide my fate. A man with curly black hair wearing a Hawaiian shirt greeted me. His name was Arnie Buckman.

“Hello, Ann,” he said. “Come sit down. Can I offer you some tea?”

Already things seemed promising. He made me some spicy tea, then took a seat at his desk. He had a folder with my name on it and he flipped it open and gave me a rundown on how they’d done their figuring and why I’d been denied. Now he said he’d be happy to reconsider if I had any further information.

“I do,” I said.

And so I began.

“Maybe on paper it doesn’t look so bad,” I said, “but you see, in the past year, we—my family—had a run of bad luck. It all started when an idiotic, uptight professional clown with dancing poodles, seventeen of them if you can believe it, moved in next door to us. We weren’t overreacting. Anyone would have been unhappy about it. This was the house we expected to stay in for some time to come. Things had been stable before this happened. My stepfather went to work, came home, we all had dinner, that kind of family. My mother had some problems, sure, but the system worked. We all pitched in to make it all right. So along came this horrible clown man, and his poodles barked all day long, and my mother is very sensitive and she started to deteriorate. It’s not like she’s an alcoholic or anything. But she’s rather reclusive and our house is like her sanctuary. So we had no choice but to move.”

He nodded and took notes, so I continued.

“We found a house nearby that seemed perfect at first, although it needed a number of expensive repairs before we moved in. Then, within a month, we discovered that the teenage son next door was part of a motorcycle gang. The gang was always roaring up to the house on their motorcycles, and then they’d party loudly with the radio blasting. I guess they got angry about the complaints because they started throwing things over the fence, including a greasy alternator that went through my parents’ bedroom window. It was the last straw. My mother was practically catatonic. We realized we had no choice but to move again.”

“That must have been very upsetting,” Arnie Buckman said.

“Yes, it was. My mother’s health problems were really flaring up. Some of them nobody could figure out. The doctors treated her horribly, as if she were some kind of hypochondriac. So to relieve her from the stress that might cut short her existence, they decided to put all our stuff into storage, take all our savings and go away for a while. We spent some time in Australia. For weeks we rode around the country on trains, north to south, east to west. Standard gauge and narrow gauge, whatever it took. I think we saw everything you could see from a train in that country. I personally could have done without the second trip across the Nullarbor Plain, which consists of two thousand miles of absolute nothingness, but the spare conditions seemed just the ticket for my mother. She cheered up. When we ran out of money we came back and had to stay in a motel for about three months, and just a few months ago, halfway through my senior year, they finally found another house— not that great but more expensive because real estate’s gone up—and that’s when they broke the news to me they’d spent my college savings on the trip, and they were completely broke.”

“Yikes,” Arnie Buckman said.

“I wasn’t sure you could tell all that from the application.”

“No,” he said. “We couldn’t. On the form all we see are the numbers. How are your parents doing now?”

“Okay,” I said. “The people next door to us on both sides are old and quiet, so my mother is relaxing.”

“And your stepfather’s job?”

“He likes to say that if he’d stayed in the private sector, he’d be making a killing, but since he made a career change into education—well, it’s just not as remunerative.”

“But it’s secure?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “They gave him time off when my mother was sick, and now he has to stay there for years.”

“And you?”

“I’m working full time and should have about eight hundred dollars saved by September.”

“Very good,” he said. “Well. It was a pleasure to meet you. We’ll see what we can do.”

I smiled. “Wow. Thanks!”

“And Ann,” he called after me, “try and have a little fun this summer too, okay?”

“Fun? Okay!”

I’d never exposed all that stuff to anyone before, and I felt strangely revitalized. I kicked up duff all the way through the redwoods to College Five and found a table in the coffeehouse. I was starving. Because Mom and Roy never took us out to eat, even ordering a sandwich in a student coffeehouse was exciting for me. I ordered turkey and avocado on whole wheat, but forgot to say hold the sprouts. I pulled the green whiskers out of the sandwich before I ate it, and it was still good. It had an immense dill pickle with it, and some olives.

Since Jake and his brother weren’t there, I decided to take off and tour all the colleges of the campus. This way I could decide which one I liked best. As it turned out, the colleges were quite spread out, and one could walk for a long time surrounded only by redwood trees without seeing a building or a person. It took me longer than I expected to reach each one. I stopped and had an ice cream cone at another coffeehouse. Then I wandered down a footpath to the sports center and checked out the facilities. I hiked over to the Performing Arts center. All good. Last but not least, I inspected the library. It had a great spiral staircase and everything was clearly marked and easy to find. I ended up in the basement investigating the periodical section and settling into a comfortable chair with a few journals ripe with articles such as “Quantifier Scope and Syntactic Islands” and “On the Nontransformational Derivation of Some Null NP Anaphors.” Great stuff, clearly.

Later, when I found my way back to College Five, I wasn’t too surprised Jake wasn’t there waiting for me. I was pretty late. In fact, it was almost dark. The coffeehouse was about to close when I saw the two of them stumbling across the quad in my direction.

“What happened?” Jake cried. “We waited forever!” His cheeks were red, his pupils big as marbles.

“Oh, I was looking around.”

“I was worried! God! Everything got totally messed up. I wish you would’ve left a note or something,” he said. “By the way, this is Winston.”

Jake’s brother bowed. He didn’t look like Jake at all. He was chubby and wore suspenders, and his hair was frizzy as a tumbleweed. “To many I’m known as the Hode,” he said.

“Did you get money?” Jake asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“We ate some psilocybin,” he said. “Sorry.”

“They feel so long and spindly,” Winston said, looking at his hands.

“I was thinking you might want to try some,” Jake said. “Want to try some?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Mind-altering,” he said. “Keeps getting more intense, like your brain’s a mouth opening wider and wider. I wish you could be here, you know, it’s like love and everything in the universe is right here. Within reach. It’s just right here around me, like a cape. Right, brother?”

“Right,” Winston said.

In Winston’s room, which was festooned with tapestries and fabrics, had stereo speakers the size of refrigerators, and was quickly empty of Winston, I saw that Jake’s double sleeping bag had already been laid out. I saw that my bag had been brought in for me, and that Jake’s bag was next to it. I saw that two pillows had been placed at the top of the double sleeping bag for our heads. But Jake seemed restless and uncomfortable. He was pacing and wringing his hands. “It seems stuffy in here, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you rather sleep outside?”

“You can, if you want,” I said.

“I’m not sure I can get in that bag right now,” he said. “I think I need some air.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“You ever tried this stuff?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Man, it’s really amazing, it’s like everything is so rich. You are beautiful, did you know I thought so?”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Winston says you’re beautiful, and he knows.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.”

“You could rule the world,” he said.

“I doubt it,” I said.

“I think I need to go outside,” he said. “I feel kind of sick.”

“I can tell,” I said.

“I’ll just take a little walk,” he said.

“Good idea,” I said.

“I’ll see you in a little while, and I’m really looking forward to that.”

“Me too,” I said.

He went out the door, closed it, then promptly came back in. “That felt good,” he said. He leaned up against the wall and slid down it until he was curled in a ball at the baseboard. “So, you like to dance?”

“Sure.”

“But not disco, right?”

“No, I hate disco.”

“The Bee Gees, they’re stupid, don’t you think?”

“Horrible,” I said.

“You know, I wasn’t going to mention this, but Sal thinks we’re an item. Thinks we’ve been messing around in the storage room.”

“He does?”

“Like it’s such a love nest.”

I said, “I can think of worse.”

He looked surprised. “True,” he said.

“So did you tell him?” I said.

“What?”

“That we weren’t.”

Jake coughed. “No. Just said, No, sir, it won’t happen again.”

“You did?”

“Yep.”

I began to laugh.

He laughed too.

“Are you okay?” I asked, moments later.

“Mmmm,” he mumbled.

“What’s wrong?”

He was ruffling the bristles on his cheeks with his palms, frowning. “I’m just a little dizzy,” he said. “Not bad. And my skin is crawling. But not too bad. God. Sometimes I hate myself,” he said. “Things are going well, then I do something stupid and screw everything up.”

“But it’s not screwed up,” I said.

“It’s not?”

“No, I’d have to say it’s completely unscrewed up.”

“Completely unscrewed up,” he repeated. “That’s the opposite of bad?”

“Right.”

“So it’s good.”

“Yes.”

He seemed to be savoring this. “Good is a weird word. Almost gross sounding.” He started to pronounce
good
in various grotesque voices and accents, which then caused him to retch.

“Jake, are you okay?”

“Mmm.”

“Want to lie down here?”

“I’d better go outside,” he said.

“Want me to come?”

“I don’t think so.” With that he did a wobbly little crouch-walk, his knees and arms all tangled and swinging as he attempted to get up. “Damn,” he said, grabbing the doorknob, and without looking back he stumbled out of sight.

I sighed.

I stayed awake for a while. I was listening to the internal noises of the dorm. From an upper floor I could hear water running, and someone coughing, and a window slamming shut. From below I heard laughter. I heard a ball bounce. I thought I heard someone howling at the moon. It reminded me of when I’d sleep over at a friend’s, and I’d lie awake listening to all the sounds another family made simply going to bed in their own house, and somehow this always made me feel kind of sad.

“Man,” Jake said, jolting up against the seat belt. “You must think I’m a lightweight. Those mushrooms were, like, putrid.”

“No big deal,” I said. He’d wake every fifty miles or so, murmur an apology, then nod off again. But I didn’t care. I was fine. I felt like I had some elbow room in this day. The highway stretched out before me without any ambiguity. Everything along the way looked even more interesting than it had coming up. The hills covered with oaks, the cows, the dry bed of the underground Salinas River we kept passing over, the oil derricks near Paso Robles, the mission I could see from the road—everything I saw seemed significant. And I liked knowing I’d be making $4 an hour that night, and going straight to work instead of having to stop at home.

Sal had had some delinquents working there in our absence. The place was a disaster. None of the cooking sheets had been cleaned, the floor was covered with flour and bits of cheese, and there was grease all over the front of the cash register.

“So,” Jake said. “We’re back.”

“Yeah.”

“And I was thinking, maybe we could do something again sometime.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I mean, if you’re not too busy.”

“Sounds good.”